America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2011

Indicator Needed

Health

National indicators on several key dimensions of health are not yet available because of the difficulties in reaching consensus on relevant definitions and measurements. The following health-related area has been identified as a priority for indicator development:

• Disability. The Forum has had a longstanding interest in developing an improved measure of child disability based on the functional difficulties experienced by children. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health for Children and Youth (ICFCY) provides a broad conceptual framework and terminology that may be a useful guide for the development of a new measure of child disability. Currently, there is little agreement about which domains of functioning should be included in a child disability measure and how functioning difficulties within these domains should be measured for children of different ages. However, recent progress in the development of an adult disability measure derived from regularly collected survey data is encouraging and underscores the need to devise a similarly concise measure of child disability.